Translation:Gd said Let there
be a raqia in the midst of the water and let it divide water from water.

Letters in this lesson:

Vocabulary in this lesson:

רָקִיעַ

Raqia

בְּתוֹךְ

in the midst of, among

מַבְדִּיל

Divide

You should recognize the roots of
the last word in the vocabulary; you’ve seen it before.This is the present tense of the verb you saw
as yavdel before, which was the aorist.This is the hifil form and is causative.

Notice that I didn’t translate raqia.The usual translation is “firmament” which is
wrong.Raqia has the root resh
qof ayin and the same root is in Exodus 39:3 which describes hammering pure
gold very thin and then cutting thin strips from it, which are woven with
colored thread to make the efod.It is
also in Numbers 17:4; Elazar hammers flat the copper censers that were not
consumed with their owners, and uses it as a covering for the ark.

“Firmament” comes from the
Septuagint which uses the Greek stereoma for raqia.Stereoma means a hard body.It suits the Aristotelian concept that above
earth is a tightly fitted hollow ball which is the sphere of the moon, the
sphere of the sun being outside of that, and then five more spheres for the
ancient visible planets.

The raqia is not a hollow
sphere.It is discussed in Babylonian
Talmud, Passover 94a, as being 1000 parasangs thick (1277 kilometers), and
below that Passover 94b says earth is 182,500 parasangs or 233 thousand
kilometers below it.What’s more,
Chagigah 13a (also in Babylonian Talmud) says that there are seven raqias,
all the same thickness (1000 parasangs) and there is a distance of 1000
parasangs between each raqia.The
raqia is a relatively thin covering over whatever is beneath it.What is
in that 1000 parasangs of distance between each raqia, nobody
discusses.

That is probably due to Mishnah
Chagigah 2:1 (Babylonian Talmud Chagigah 11b) which says “There are four things
that if a man thinks about them, it would be better if he had never been born:
what is above; what is below; what is before; and what is after.”Look: Judaism has 613 commandments.It’s hard to obey them all.If you haven’t done that, it doesn’t matter
what you think about esoteric things like the seven heavens, or what holds the
world up (pre-Newton), how the universe began (pre-Einstein), or how it will
end.

And if you do spend time on those
things, you always get to a point where you run out of answers.Then you either stop talking, or you start
making things up.You’re not Gd.Only Gd knows the truth about those
things.People will either ignore you
because they know you don’t know, or they’ll believe you.At that point you become“somebody putting a stumbling block before
the blind” because you have them believing you know what you’re talking about
when you don’t.And that right there
violates one of the 613 commandments.

That’s not anti-science.Science admits it doesn’t know
everything.That’s why scientists still
have work to do.Judaism is not
anti-science.It says that to be a Jew
you have to fulfill the 613 commandments.You can do that and still be a scientist. But if you’re not a scientist and you don’t
study science so that you know where science ends and the unknown begins, you
should be going and fulfilling commandments.

Why didn’t Septuagint use a better
word?I don’t know.I’m working on a verse by verse comparison
ofSeptuagint with the Hebrew and I’m
rapidly coming to the conclusion that Septuagint is the work of a bunch of
careless idiots, one step above those monkeys that accidentally reproduced
Shakespeare in the joke.There probably
isn’t a Greek word with all the connotations of raqia.That’s common to all languages; no two
languages have words for all the same concepts, and you have to approximate or
use multiple words to explain what you mean.